ScandalUMD

It would have been tons more appealing to Godzilla fans. But I'd argue that the novelty of seeing Godzilla rendered using high-end FX would not in itself have made a good movie.

What would have made it a better movie is to recognize the original Godzilla movies as nuclear parables, and to give the movie some kind of purpose along the same line. If it had been made after 2001, Godzilla probably would have made a better terrorism analogy than "War of the Worlds."

But then again, if Emmerich had made it, it would have been as ham-handed as "Day After Tomorrow."


Sort of. It gave him a radioactive origin. At least they resisted the pandemic urge to remake all radioactive paranoid fantasies of the 50s and 60s as modern genetic engineering paranoid fantasies.



See, I find a bad action-blockbuster to be just as bad as a ham-handed tear-jerker drama, or one of those comedies that forgets to have jokes. To view things otherwise is to rob the good drama entries of the acclaim they've earned, and to buffer some of the worst offenders in bloated, awful filmmaking from their deserved criticism.

There are popcorn flicks that are exhilarating, original, witty, and feature characters who we actually care about. And then there are some that are boring, and those that make you wonder how the people who made it could possibly be so dumb, and how they could possibly believe their audience was so dumb. If you go to this kind of movie, and your response is "I saw $150 million in special effects, so i guess I had fun." you don't see the difference between "Pluto Nash" and "Die Hard."

You've gotta draw a distinction, for example, between "Spider-Man" and "Daredevil," or between "Speed 2" and "Pirates of the Caribbean." And once you make that distinction, you might as well acknowledge that, in genre films, there are good films and bad films.